DISQUS

Jake (aka Jawee) · 1 year ago

At school about everything is blocked.... adult content, humour, games, communication (e-mail, forums, IM, etc. but you can see your e-mail from IGoogle), most web apps (Google Reader and Google Notebook are the only exceptions I have found thus far- the former lets a lot get in), online encyclopedias (except for Encarta online), proxies (occasioanlly one gets through), archive.org, Google translate, Google cache, personal pages (except weebly), free domains such as co.nr, uni.cc, and ,tk, most foreign language sites, download sites, and the list goes on. It generates a heck of a lot of false positives, and a lot of actually bad stuff ends up getting through. Luckily, I can tunnel through SSH and use Portable Firefox with no problem.

Benjamin Golub · 1 year ago

I thought that's why you sent those images via mail2ff. Makes sense. Nothing is blocked at my current work but my last gig did block a lot of things. And when you visited a site you weren't supposed to (including any webmail) a big red "access denied" image flashed on your screen scolding you. I hated it; especially when I wanted to take a break during lunch and catch up on the news.

Blocking sites at work seems ridiculous to me. Let your workers to whatever they want because you can always monitor their usage and approach them directly if things get out of control. Blocking for a free wifi network makes sense but it's a shame that you had to jump through so many hoops to get this post up.

Of course there are ways around these sort of filters but they are pretty nerdy (an SSH tunnel would do the trick).

Phil Glockner · 1 year ago

When you checked Gmail, did you go through a secure link or insecure? If you ever find yourself in the same situation, you may want to try https://mail.google.com. When you go to that link, both the authentication and the session are encrypted, which means more security PLUS the embedded IM client traffic is encrypted.. no way of blocking that without blocking everything!

paulo · 1 year ago

You can bypass most network restrictions if you use an SSH or VPN tunnel into an unrestricted network (your home or office for example). Tunneling allows you to forward your network traffic through a secure connection directly to your own network... web sites won't be blocked, you can check your email, and FTP to your hearts content. The only downside is the connection will be a little slower *but* this is well worth it if you access public Wi-Fi hotspots. Using a secure tunnel encrypts your web traffic so snooping eyes can see your plain-text passwords.

Here are some links:

< http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/21/how-to-ssh-t... >< http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/stm/ >< http://www.leapingbytes.com/almostvpn >

nickobec · 1 year ago

I work for a large public library and look after proxy which allows/blocks access to sites for the 100 public and 200 staff computers. Another team are the firewall nazis who block access to any outgoing port except 80 and 443, so no ftp, imap or pop email, ssh etc.
The censorship discussion is interesting and passionate in libraries. When the proxy responsibility got move from a Govt IT department to the Library. There was a good debate before it was decided to block porn because the public machines are in a public area and there have been some "incidents" in the past and "hacking" sites to protect the public machines (if you want to hack those public machine you need to read up at home). All the other typical restrictions SNS, webmail etc was removed.
We have just implemented free wifi in the public areas, without these restriction through a third party. (only limitation is speed 128k).
Most other Govt departments here block a big number of sites, including social networking, webmail and the like. I have known of one in the past that blocked all flash content and another that now blocks wikipedia.
One Department I use to worked for blocked a large number of sites and services. However, staff could get an exemption via their manager if they needed access to one of these sites for their work. Last I heard over 400 of the 700 staff had blanket exemptions and could access all sites with a number of different protocols.
I prefer my current environment were management trusts their staff to do the right thing.

Shannon Entin · 1 year ago

Well I'm pretty impressed with your blogging given the fact that you are at a hospital and just had twins. Congrats!

Sometimes I work in a coffee shop or at my gym. There are occasional blocks, but I'd go nuts if I had to deal with filtering on a regular basis.

jules · 1 year ago

Hey there Louis!
Congrats on the expansion of your family!

With regards to figuring out what's blocked/not blocked... i'm getting a tingly feeling that fairly soon your experience will be mirrored by thousands of other internet folks. Within a short time, there's going to some neat web app that's going to let you see all the content that's being filtered through your ISP. Something akin to the broadband speed testers that are now prevalent.

Cheers,
jules

LDonovan · 1 year ago

Try adding those sites to netvibes and you may be able to view them - I can use Gmail, add to Twitter and view Facebook that way when I'm in a healthcare setting.

mrwizard14 · 1 year ago

My school has a very unusual method of blocking things. In the beginning of the year, nothing was blocked, but in the last couple of months, everything became blocked. They even blocked wikipedia and google docs. They eventually unblocked those due to teacher outcry. Digg was blocked at first, but then it became mysteriously unblocked. (My theory is that the admins liked to read it instead of working.)
Thus began the attempts to bypass the block. Our first happy moment was when we discovered that they didn't reverse-dns the blocks, and by pinging the domains, we could get the ip address and access the sites that way. But someone used that too much, and the admins noticed.
My second attempt was to try to use a proxy. I put in a proxy address into explorer, and suddenly there was no net access. It turns out that the school has us connect through their own proxy.
But Tor should still work, right? I can just set it up to go through their proxy and into tor itself. The issue was installing it. We couldn't download any files, and we weren't allowed to connect laptops or thumb drives to the computers. I could still do thumb drives because the teachers didn't really care, but laptops were out of the question. I set upon the solution of installing OSX86 onto a tiny hard drive, booting from that, and running my own homegrown system that used tor. The problem with that is that OSX86 is illegal, so I can't do that.
I have a temporary solution in Peacefire.orgs web proxy mailing list. Usually that will get me through most of 1 day out of every 3, so that's pretty nice. For the rest of the days, google caches will get me enough to survive.
I have no computers at home to set up a tunnel.
Any suggestions on how I can get to twitter to indulge my fix at school?